Bennett Thrasher managing partner and CEO Jeff Call is making plans for his Top 75 Firm next year as it ramps up the use of artificial intelligence and helps clients adjust to changes from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
"From my perspective, I think we're going to continue to see continued change," Call told Accounting Today. "Obviously, there's a lot of moving parts of what's going on in the industry. There's consolidation and a pretty substantial use of technology, AI, automation, as well as continued use of offshore resources, another element that we see is a pretty regular occurrence for the Top 100 Firms."
His Atlanta-based firm is working hard to adjust to all those elements and make sure to integrate them into its strategy, which includes
"We do believe we are in our best position as an independent firm," said Call. "We have resisted private equity. We're continuing to invest in our people, continuing to build out additional resources, bringing in high-quality lateral talent, and continuing to innovate and deliver five-star client service to our clients on a regular basis."
He believes that staying independent helps his firm provide higher-quality service. "A number of firms, as they're going through private equity and other transactions, are getting distracted by other things that maybe become top of mind for their new ownership," said Call. "We believe that if we continue to thrive on the client service side, take great care of our people and take great care of our clients, that will continue to let us be a differentiated firm that will have continued strong growth."
M&A deals
Bennett Thrasher has not been doing many mergers and acquisitions in recent years, unlike PE-funded firms that seem to make M&A deals an intrinsic part of their growth strategy.
"We have looked at some smaller transactions," said Call. "That is still something that we would like to do, but it's not a massive part of our strategy. Most of our strategy is based on organic growth. All of our partners and our growth team are very focused on growing the firm organically. We have brought in some lateral partners. Maybe you'd call that an 'aqui-hire' opportunity, where you bring in a talented person at the partner level, and they are able to try and bring in clients that they have relationships with. We would like to do full-scale acquisitions, but they have not been a major part of our strategy. We don't expect that is likely to be the case, partly just because of some of the forces at play with private equity."
M&A transactions at Bennett Thrasher have differed from the practices at many PE-funded firms. "Our transactions have traditionally some upfront cash, some earnout, and then participation as equity in Bennett Thrasher, whereas the private equity firm transactions are very heavily cash oriented on the front end," said Call. "Unless we wanted to leverage our balance sheet, we wouldn't have the kind of cash to do those transactions, so we've generally been more focused on lateral integrations and building the talent organically."
He expects to see more of his clients doing M&A deals of their own, however. "We've continued to see pretty strong growth in the mergers and acquisitions space," said Call. "Our transaction advisory services practice is one of the fastest-growing areas in our firm, growing more than 30% a year. They primarily operate in the middle market, but the middle market activity has still been strong. There hasn't been much pause in that space from what we've seen, at least with our client base, so we anticipate that may improve even more as interest rates go down. A lot of these transactions are private equity or private credit type transactions, and as interest rates are lower, that allows them to be more willing to use leverage and keep that market in a strong position."
Tariff and shutdown effects
The firm has been helping clients who are concerned about tariffs affecting their business. "There was a little bit of disruption from that, probably in the earlier part of this year," said Call. "I do feel like business centers don't like uncertainty, so as it appeared that the tariff numbers were starting to move around, those things do cause some clients that have international operations to pause big investment decisions and things of that nature. We've seen that stabilize a little bit more recently, so I think business centers have started making decisions and moving forward with whatever they thought the rules were going to be. Certainly it would be helpful if there was complete clarity and some of the legal Supreme Court decisions, etc., still put some of these elements into question as to which way the tariff action will be going."
However, he pointed out that businesses can't wait until the
Clients also had to weather the recent government shutdown, which was still ongoing when Call was interviewed last month.
"We have seen some disruption from the IRS in dealing on some matters," said Call. "Some aspects of the IRS have reduced staff, or some of the groups aren't available to be a resource, so that has slowed down some interactions with the IRS. I think all the filing activities still continue, because for the most part, that's all done electronically. But if you need to interact with a real person at the IRS with respect to an audit or other notice issues or other payment issues that you're dealing with, trying to get a live person on the phone is more challenging in today's environment."
OBBBA impact
He is hopeful about the future of his firm and his clients next year after passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act last July. "We do expect in 2026 we will see some pretty good growth potential across our clients' businesses," said Call. "Obviously some aspects of the OBBBA are going to encourage investment, and we will see clients making more substantial investments with some of the bonus depreciation and other elements that may have reduced some of the regulations in certain areas to make it certain tax-advantaged investments. We do a lot of work in the technology, construction and entertainment [sectors], and I've definitely seen strong activity there, especially in technology. I think the R&D credit getting clarified was a big aspect to that, so we do expect that will probably be a nice improvement for the technology-based companies to have clarity on that [Section] 174 area that was previously being hampered by reducing the benefit of R&D expenditures."
He expects more clients to invest in research and development now. "It's more tax advantaged to make that investment today than it was," said Call. "We had a couple years there where they paused some of the benefits of R&D expenditures. I do anticipate that will be more positive for that industry."
AI and automation
In the meantime, his own firm has been investing more heavily in technology such as artificial intelligence for automation. "Continued use and leaning into AI and automation is a big trend," said Call. "We're investing in tools that are trying to help us automate certain tasks that might be more elementary, that maybe our staff people don't enjoy doing, and allow them to be more advisory oriented and able to take on more of a consulting and advisory role at an earlier point in their career. Using those AI and automation tools should allow them to be able to be more business advisors to our clients and less focused on the elementary or lower-level compliance tasks that maybe are less desirable. We're spending more time training and upskilling our people to help elevate them to that trusted advisor status at a quicker pace than maybe they would have in the past."
Bennett Thrasher recently held a partner retreat where a researcher talked about some of the trends in the accounting profession. "There's a continued push toward advisory in the space, in general," said Call. "For us, our advisory practice probably makes up 25 or 30% of our entire business, so that has been a practice that we've continued to be investing in and launching new services. I anticipate that will continue to be the case. I think advisory practices are anticipated to grow at faster rates than traditional audit and tax compliance areas."
Bennett Thrasher intends to continue to invest in its traditional audit and tax compliance practices as well, but Call anticipates the growth levels there might be a little more subdued than from its traditional tax consulting and other advisory-oriented practices.
"Forensic accounting, transaction advisory services, technology consulting, outsourced accounting are going to have more robust growth rates because people are looking for advisory-oriented solutions that they believe are going to add more value to their business," he added, "and so we are putting more continued emphasis on that area."
